KaleidoCamera teaches your DSLR new light field tricks

A prototype for a new DSLR add-on is poised to bring plenoptic capabilities to consumer cameras. The KaleidoCamera is designed to sit between a standard DSLR's sensor and lens. A diffuser splits light passing through the lens into nine different beams, each passing through a filter before it reaches the camera's sensor.

Depending on the configuration, each beam of light can be filtered to isolate particular colors, or capture a scene with nine different tone curves to create an HDR image in post-processing. With a slight adjustment, the KaleidoCamera is capable of light-field imaging. Lytro cameras have already made this capability available to consumers, but the KaleidoCamera would be the first device to work with a consumer's existing camera.

This is a picture showing the prototype KaleidoCamera fitted to a Leica medium-format DSLR.

Plenoptic cameras split the incoming light based on the angle it arrived from, meaning depth information is captured about the scene. The more images the scene is split into, the greater the depth information captured, but the lower the resolution of the final image.

Two configurations of the KaleidoCamera - the uppermost uses filters for selective color or HDR photography, and the lower configuration uses a light field design to enable plenoptic photography.

Applications extend beyond interesting photo experiments and post-capture focusing - the KaleidoCamera could see use in "scientific imaging, industrial quality control, remote sensing, computer vision and computer graphics," according to a paper published by the prototypes creators.

Comments

Very fine info.These are tips and well explained, but I was looking for more actual photography tricks like in Flairsen Photography Tricks which covers photoshop, but emphasizes quite a big range of actual tricks.﻿

I noted how the proposed resolution was stated as less than HD. I assume it isn't much better than the 1K resolution used by the Lytro Light Field camera. I consider this extremely low resolution to be a major handicap that limits the usefulness of this technology.

For years people were happy with postcard size prints from 35mm film cameras and 1mp makes a nice postcard size print. Going to a birthday party and just want to be able to make postcard size prints without worrying about getting everything in focus and this would be great. The problem with Lytro is they made it all closed source, with this you would still have access to the raw files and other vendors could supply software (adobe or even rawtherapee). You also have to use their camera. With this you can use any camera.

Interesting; it's rather like the old stereo mirror rigs gone wild -- or perhaps I should say gone to the other end of the lens. The diffuser is problematic as is the critical alignment of the image multiplier discussed in the paper's section 5.1, and there is a substantial loss in resolution (inevitable with multiple copies of the image being separated out) which I think would discourage use by most DPReview readers, but overall a very nice piece of work which could lead to some interesting devices. Being able to use conventional lenses and optical components that are relatively large (compared to things like sensor-stack microlenses) is a big plus.

That's brilliant! Such tools will help to proceed to mature digital photography. Today's digital photography is basically replacing film by a sensor, combining it with abrasive mechanical shutters and loudly slapping mirrors (if you want the best camera technology available). With those camera anachronisms we produce loads of 2D images we've seen since ages. Of course, we all still love to do this, me too, and there are still plenty of new, wonderful images produced that way. But I am pretty sure that lightfield/plenoptic photography is the first real digital photography, since its images contain one dimension of information more than any classic print.

Your statement "Today's digital photography is basically replacing film", might have been true almost a decade ago. These days, the replacement has already happened. Kodak is bankrupt and even Fujifilm is discontinuing entire lines of film. It is fait accompli.

@ David Elliott Lewis,The point here is not whether digital photography has completely or not replaced film. The point is that today's digital cameras take pictures the same way the film cameras do (did ?) : using a rectilinear lens to produce a flat 2D image that is focused once for all.Field cameras introduce a new way of taking pictures even if the final image, once you have choosen the focus plane in post-processing, is still a flat 2D picture...The perfect photographics tool, IMHO, should be able to record both depth and 3D... And should be paired with the perfect "playback" tool : the one that lets your eyes choose to focus anywhere in the picture... Which is totally different from printing/displaying a flat 2D picture with an infinite depth of field, because the human eyes do not have an infinite depth of field.

Not quite, Lytro delivers living pictures and tools for manipulating and playing with after the fact and all that garbage about printing Lytro images at a max of postcard size is wrong, I have gone to 8x10 without issue.

That being said, this does look cool and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

I think soon or late we will forget about clumsy lenses. The Photography will suffer the same fate as the biological vision. The eye, a very imperfect optical engine, coupled with the vast computational power of the brain, continuously scans the space and gives a sharp image with huge dynamic range.

I invite everybody to have a look at a lecture given by one of this project's authors last year:http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/d4/areas/giana/Teaching/ComputationalPhotographySS2012/It has some interesting ideas about how the art of photography may change in the future, esp. that in the studio. E.g., scene illumination may be added after the shot etc. ...

With todays huge megapixel sensors, dividing one into 1/9 sections still give you printable results unlike the Lytro. Cool beans if you have an SLR, but I wonder how much the lens/software package is going to cost you. :)

Never had a problem printing my Lytro pictures, already 8x10 without issue. The key for Lytro, though, will be to get ahead of this - their camera and its pictures are not infallible but certainly a good start. Now on the other side of the coin, I haven't seen any mention of the pictures coming out of this attachment being living pictures.

Sweet stuff :)I know the institute which did it and most of their research is top notch, actually.I'd say the main application isn't what they describe (the conversion of a high end consumer camera into an industrial one). Even though it may be an important application for German machine engineering.

I'd say the main application is as a research and prototype device to path the way to lens-array based smartphones (which most likely will produce an array of 3x3 images, each of at least HD quality, too). Interesting for high end smart phone lens makers like Zeiss.

A 3x3 lens array-based smartphone reduces the crop factor by 3 (such as from 4.5 to APSC) and brings smartphones on par with dSLRs. Esp. as the array allows for parallax-accelerated autofocus (before shot) and plenoptics-like focus-tune after the shot, beating phase detect AF. This device from Max-Planck Institute will help explore stuff like this.

Well back to the turn of the XX Century, a lab technician was testing the consistency of a resin to be used on car tires. In the end he discovered some moisten residual, not so hard to be used on tire's manufacturing, but the chewing gum was born.

Which is probably why they are showing the prototype on a medium-format camera i.e. Leica S2 is 37.5 MP

So while it will turn your 36mp camera into a 4mp camera, it will be a 4mp image with 9-image HDR capability - with no tripod required for multiple images, and no software-based correction for varying camera position between the nine 4mp photos.

Stitch a few of those together, and you will have a nice HDR panorama. :)

Roland: I agree, it makes sense, but I would have thought, at least for the HDR functionality, that a 4-to-1 ratio would be ideal and a 9-to-1 would be a tad bit of overkill. But then I'm very binary-minded, so maybe its just me.